The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (12 page)

And then there was the conversation that revealed to Lili how little she herself had managed to hide about her life with Kazem.

It happened during one of her visits to the Khorramis’ extended family. After lunch, she rose to fetch Ma Mère a fresh cup of tea when she heard one of the women asking Kazem’s aunt, “Is that your
aroos
?”

“Yes, the poor thing.”

The poor thing?
Lili stole a sideways look at the two women and realized that they were talking about her. She hustled away, but then, from behind a banister, she strained to make out the rest of their talk.

“
Sadisme
,” she heard Kazem’s aunt saying. “You remember how he was as a child?” She paused, shook her head sadly, and continued. “His parents used to send him to the countryside for it. We’d all hoped it would help him to marry, but…” Here her voice trailed off.

Sadisme.
Lili mouthed the foreign word to herself. What did it mean? From the way Kazem’s aunt had said it, Lili guessed it must be something terrible, some sort of disease. She repeated the word silently to herself several more times. If she could somehow find the meaning of this word, surely she could also find its cure?

In the meantime, she made a lesser but still useful discovery: a well-seasoned herb stew with rice could sometimes soften the edges of her husband’s temper. With this realization she quickly devoted herself to perfecting her cooking. Every Thursday morning she walked to the
bazaarcheh
down the street and brought back cilantro,
chives, mint, and parsley by the bucketful. The freshest, most fragrant herbs always came with the stems and roots encrusted with dirt. Back at home she rinsed the herbs many times over, pulled out her biggest copper pot, and bathed them for an hour in salted water before starting on the rice.

It was when she was cleaning and rinsing the herbs one day that year that she discovered a way to make herself disappear. By focusing all her attention on a chore, she could summon a distinct sensation of cutting loose from her worries, from the room, from her own body. She practiced the trick over and over until she could sustain this peaceful state for intervals of an hour—or even longer.

Five months pregnant, her fingers and feet swollen beyond remedy, she was making herself disappear one June afternoon when she suddenly heard loud voices in the stairwell. Kazem was arguing with the landlord and his wife again. Lili shut her eyes and kept her knife moving over the pile of herbs. The voices grew louder and then stopped. Kazem flung the door open, but before he could slam it shut the landlord and his wife shouldered their way inside the apartment. Lili felt a sudden sharp pain in her temple, but it was only when she opened her eyes again and met Kazem’s that she looked down and saw the blood.

Slowly and with something strangely resembling indifference, she traced the fine red rivulets now soaking through the herbs until she found the source of the bleeding. The tip of her index finger, she saw, was dangling from her hand. She blinked—once, twice, again. The knife dropped, just barely missing her foot.

“You clumsy idiot!” Kazem shouted. He lurched toward her and she screamed.

“I’ve told you,” the landlord called out, “no more of this, no more hitting her—”

“It’s nothing to do with you!” Kazem snapped, but the landlord and his wife had seen Lili’s ravaged finger and her knees as they
buckled under her. “That girl’s got to see a doctor!” he shouted, and pulled her off the floor and into the open air.

The landlord’s wife had been so kind to Lili that night, had told her to come at once if ever she had troubles again. “Troubles”—that’s exactly how she’d put it, and she’d been so tactful, too, bending toward Lili and whispering so that no one in the crowded hospital ward would overhear her. Lili had nodded and promised that she would, but from that night on Kazem was always careful to hit her only in the places where no one could see the bruises, and she was both too ashamed and too frightened to tell anyone when next the “troubles” began.

Even to those closest to her, the fact that the abuse she suffered was not, strictly speaking, uncommon made it no less difficult to name. Khanoom and her aunts all guessed at her situation from the start, and yet they never spoke of it. They reasoned that any intervention on their part would only anger Kazem and therefore add to her difficulties. They said nothing at all and, in some unspoken way of her own, Lili understood that their silence was meant as kindness.

As consolation, perhaps, for their reticence, Khanoom often urged her to visit the family, but as her pregnancy advanced, Lili had less and less inclination to leave her own apartment. In part this had to do with the astonishing changes in her body. Her belly seemed to grow by the day and then by the hour. While her feet and legs swelled to gigantic proportions, her cheeks hollowed out and her face took on a yellowish pallor. She could barely make out the symptoms of pregnancy from the effects of Kazem’s beatings; the two would always be irrevocably linked in her mind. Indeed, any pleasant reveries she indulged about the baby were overshadowed by her fearfulness. And the uglier and more awkward she seemed to herself, the less she
troubled with her hair or her clothes and the more frequently she resorted to throwing her chador over her housedress when she went out to the market or the bathhouse.

It was in this state that Sohrab made what would be his first and only visit to her as a married woman. She’d pulled on her veil, grabbed a large tin canister, and set out to buy some kerosene from the neighborhood market. A few steps from the apartment, she spied a well-dressed gentleman approaching her from the opposite end of the alley. She strengthened her grip on the canister. With her free hand she held her veil under her chin and prepared to lower her eyes.

She looked up and realized that the gentleman approaching her was her own father.

“
Bab
joon!
” she sputtered. “You’ve come to visit me?”

“Yes, yes,” Sohrab answered impatiently. “But what is that you’re holding?”

“Holding?” It took her a moment to realize he meant the canister. “Oh, this! It’s for the kerosene.”

Sohrab frowned and reached his hand out to take it from her. “You go back home now,” he told her.

She’d never seen her father holding anything half as common as that rusty old canister, and she now wished desperately to snatch it back from him. “But we haven’t got any kerosene,” she protested, “and the rooms get so cold at night.”

“I said it’s time to go home.”

Back in the apartment, she flung off her chador and watched as his eyes took in the peeling paint on the walls, the exposed pipes above the kitchen sink, the uncurtained windows. Had her aunts spoken to him about Kazem? Her cheeks burned with shame at the thought. She hurried to the kitchen to brew him a pot of tea. She found no sweets in the cupboard and so, hands trembling, she piled chunks of sugar into a small bowl for him.

He didn’t stay long enough to finish even one cup of tea, but before he left Sohrab pressed several hundred
tomans
into her hands and told her she could always come to him for more money. Then, the following morning, her aunt Zaynab came around to tell Kazem that Sohrab would soon send someone to help her with the housework and errands. He’d already arranged a room for a servant with the landlord and would pay all of the servant’s wages himself.

“Does Sohrab Khan think these are his own princely quarters in Shemiran?” Kazem chided when Zaynab approached him with the offer. “She’ll do her own work, like any decent woman.” No servant was sent to help her, but from then on every Friday at noon a basket full of provisions—a fresh chicken and some rice in a pot, cantaloupes and apples, two jugs of milk—showed up alongside a full canister of kerosene on her doorstep, and she never had to guess who’d sent it for her.

The weeks wore on in this way until, just a few days shy of her delivery date, Lili at last moved back to Khanoom’s house for her lying-in period.

They were all sleeping around the
korsi
(a low table with a heater underneath it), their arms and limbs intertwined under piles of quilts, when she felt a surge of warm liquid pass between her legs. She kicked off the covers and cried out for Khanoom. “Shhh, shhh,” her grandmother soothed. “This means it’s time,
bacheh-joon.
It’s time….”

Hearing this, the others untangled themselves from the blankets, threw on their veils, and together lifted Lili from the
korsi
and hauled her into a taxi.

“How young you are!” the midwife exclaimed when Lili appeared in the clinic sobbing and clutching her grandmother’s hand. Very young mothers were becoming less common, at least in the capital,
and the midwife seemed utterly charmed when she learned Lili was still just thirteen years old. And when, after just three-quarters of an hour, the baby emerged, to be laid on Lili’s chest still slick and warm with blood, the midwife declared it another blessing of youth as well as an auspicious start to her life as a new mother.

Lili lifted her head and peered at the newborn. Here she was at last, Lili thought, her own baby! Kazem’s family had chosen a name for her—Sara. Lili looked for the first time at Sara and for a moment a feeling of tenderness overtook her pain. Finding Sara whole, with all of her fingers and toes in place, Lili fell back against the pillows. A cloth soaked with chloroform was passed under her nose, and with that she sank almost immediately into a deep sleep.

“Wake up and see who has come for you!”

Lili rubbed her eyes and raised herself onto her elbows. Every part of her body, from her head to her feet, felt impossibly sore. She looked out the window and saw that the sky had turned dark. How long had she been here? Somewhere in the room a woman was moaning. From another corner there came the high-pitched squalling of a newborn.

The midwife was holding a crying baby—
her
baby, Lili realized with a start. Sara had been swaddled in a white woolen blanket. Her little face was pinched and red. She looked exhausted.

Lili reached out for her.

“She’ll want her milk now,” the midwife said, smiling kindly as she handed Sara over to Lili.

First the midwife showed Lili how to cradle one hand behind the infant’s head and cup her breast with the other. She lowered Sara to her chest and nudged the little mouth toward her nipple, but the baby showed no interest whatever in latching on. “
Khanoom
,” Lili said, looking up at the midwife, “why won’t she drink?” The midwife shushed her, patted her hand, and then told Lili to lie down on her side and positioned the baby facing toward her that way. But
no matter what the midwife or Lili did that day, the tiny pair of pink lips stayed locked in a tight line.

Why, Lili puzzled, wouldn’t Sara take her milk? Was it true what everyone said, that a fetus fed on its mother’s emotions? Had her baby come into this world already full with her own grief? Tears spilled from Lili’s cheeks as she considered this, but the midwife hushed her and told her not to worry, that there was no child yet born who would not drink from its mother’s breast once it grew hungry enough.

Four days later, when Lili finally left the hospital for Khanoom’s house, Sara had still not taken so much as a drop of Lili’s milk. On the fifth day sweat began beading Lili’s forehead at dawn and by noon it had thoroughly soaked her bed linens. Her hair clung to her scalp in wet tendrils; her breasts grew heavy and then turned hard as rocks. Her temperature rose and fell, climbed past a hundred, and settled at 102 degrees, where it would hover for the next three days.

Khanoom put her faith in timeworn methods. At regular intervals throughout the day, she pressed boiled cabbage leaves against Lili’s breasts and then kneaded them with her calloused fingers. To bring down Lili’s fever, Khanoom held a cold compress to Lili’s temple and spoon-fed her ice water tinged with
limoo shirin
, sweet lemon. When, finally, Lili’s milk let down, it was Khanoom who cried out to God in thanks and vowed she’d sacrifice two lambs for His infinite mercy. For the next few days Khanoom, her eyes full of sleep, appeared at Lili’s bedside at dawn, and held out a saucer while she expelled her milk. As promised, Khanoom had two lambs slaughtered, cooked, and served up as alms to the poor.

It was not enough to stop the fever, though. Lili’s whole body shook and shivered, slackened like a doll’s until finally she became so delirious that she would not even answer to her own name. Engorgement had led to infection. Late one night she was rushed
back to the hospital to have her milk ducts sliced open with a knife, and for days afterward bad milk seeped from her breasts.

She woke one morning feeling completely hollowed out, but her forehead had cooled considerably. She sat up and ate a full breakfast, her first meal since having left the hospital over one week earlier, and Khanoom, in her fine deep voice, sang out prayers as Lili ate.

At noon Khanoom came to Lili’s room with a basket full of caramel-colored puppies, and she woke to find three identical pairs of brown eyes squinting at her.